Special Education Research Grant Program

Overview

<p>The purpose of the Special Education Research Grants Program (CFDA 84.324A) is to foster solutions to pressing problems faced by students with or at risk for disabilities, their families, and education systems. IES intends for this program to (1) develop new approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment, as well as encourage the rethinking of education finance, policies, and systems-level programs that support students with disabilities from birth through postsecondary education; and (2) build the evidence base necessary to better assess, intervene, and support learners with disabilities to improve their education and post-school outcomes.</p> <p>IES seeks applications that will significantly improve education programs, policies, and practices and that have the potential to lead to marked improvements in outcomes for students with disabilities. Although NCSER-funded researchers have made many advances in the past decade, students with disabilities continue to lag behind their peers without disabilities on nearly all education and post-school outcome measures. Researchers should clearly articulate how and why their research will change the status quo in ways that can lead to advancement in teaching, learning, and/or education systems and why results will be important to disseminate to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.</p> <p>A wide range of research is supported through this program, including, but not limited to, programs to improve child development and school readiness; academic and/or behavioral interventions; instructional practices and/or professional development programs for teachers and other school-based personnel; strategies for improving the family support and engagement critical to the success of students with disabilities; as well as policies and systems-level interventions and programs to address school finance, school-community collaborations, or school structures that affect educational progress for students with disabilities.</p> <p><strong>Requirements</strong></p> <p style="padding-left:30px"><strong>1. Children and Youth with or At-Risk for a Disability: </strong>All research supported under the Special Education Research Grants program must focus on children and/or youth with or at risk for disabilities.</p> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>2. Education Settings:</strong> Proposed research must be relevant to education in the United States and must address factors under the control of U.S. education systems.</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>3. Student Outcomes: </strong>All research supported under the Special Education Research Grants program must focus on and include measures of one or more of the following student outcomes that support success in school and afterwards:</div> <ul> <ul> <li><strong>Developmental</strong>: cognitive, communicative, linguistic, social, emotional, adaptive, functional, and/or physical development</li> <li><strong>School readiness</strong>: pre-reading, language, vocabulary, early STEM (science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics) knowledge, and social and behavioral competencies (including self-regulation and executive function)</li> <li><strong>Literacy</strong>: reading, writing, and/or language development</li> <li><strong>STEM</strong>: science (including computer science), technology, engineering, and/or mathematics</li> <li><strong>Social/Emotional/Behavioral</strong>: social skills, attitudes, behaviors, and mental health important to learners’ education and post-school success</li> <li><strong>Functional</strong>: behaviors and skills across domains that learners need to participate in developmentally appropriate routines and activities in the context of everyday living</li> <li><strong>Secondary/Transition</strong>: persistence and completion of high school course credits in content areas, high school graduation, certificates, and successful transition from high school to work settings, independent living, or postsecondary education and training</li> <li><strong>Postsecondary</strong>: access to, persistence in, progress through, and completion of postsecondary education; or learning, achievement, and higher order thinking in postsecondary courses. In addition to these outcomes, applicants should consider employment and earnings outcomes such as hours of employment, job stability, wages, and benefits.</li> </ul> </ul> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>4. Topics: </strong></div> <ol> <ol> <li>Cognition and Student Learning</li> <li>Early Intervention and Early Learning</li> <li>Educators and School-Based Service Providers</li> <li>Families of Children with Disabilities</li> <li>Reading, Writing, and Language</li> <li>Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)</li> <li>Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Competence</li> <li>Systems, Policy, and Finance</li> <li>Transition to Postsecondary Education, Career, and/or Independent Living</li> </ol> </ol> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>5. Dissemination History and Plan:</strong><span> All applicants must describe their history with disseminating results from past research and present a plan to disseminate project findings.</span></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><span></span></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>6. Project Types:</strong><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Measurement</strong>: Measurement supports both the development and validation of new or modified instruments for use by educators or education researchers. Some Measurement projects will result in instruments that have been validated for use with specific populations in specific contexts to support education practice and policy. Other Measurement projects will result in instruments for use by education researchers. Both types of instruments are needed to ensure that high-quality measurement tools are available to support rigorous exploratory, development, and efficacy research.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Exploration</strong>: Exploration supports projects that identify relationships between learner-, educator-, school-, and policy-level characteristics and meaningful education outcomes (see <a href="https://ies.ed.gov/seer/">https://ies.ed.gov/seer/</a&gt;). Findings from Exploration projects point out potentially fruitful areas for further investigation from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, rather than providing strong evidence for adopting specific interventions or measurement tools. Exploration projects should inform future work to determine what works, for whom, and under what conditions.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Development and Innovation</strong>: Development and Innovation supports the development and pilot testing of new or modified education interventions that are intended to produce beneficial impacts on learner outcomes.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up</strong>: Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up supports initial efficacy studies of education interventions predicted to have a meaningful effect on important education outcomes using designs that meet the IES What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) design standards5 (<a href="https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Handbooks">https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Hand…;) and longer term follow-up studies of rigorously evaluated interventions. Initial Efficacy projects test interventions that have not been rigorously evaluated previously to examine the intervention’s beneficial impact on education outcomes in comparison to an alternative practice, program, or policy. Follow-Up projects test the longer term impact of an intervention that has been shown to have beneficial impacts on education outcomes in a previous or ongoing evaluation study. Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up projects should provide practical information about the benefits and costs of specific interventions to inform the intervention’s theory of change, its implementation, its usefulness, and its contribution to future research.</div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px">IES is interested in studies of interventions that can reasonably be expected to have meaningful effects on important education outcomes. IES expects applicants to describe and justify the effect sizes that they anticipate for the interventions they propose to evaluate.<strong><br></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div><strong></strong></div>